Sercop Signs 114 Drug Deals; 71 Sit Idle Without Orders

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POLICY & MARKETS · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 · LATIN AMERICA

Signed contracts are not medicine. That distinction — obvious in principle, consequential in practice — is now the central problem inside Ecuador’s public health procurement system. According to a report by Primicias, Ecuador’s Servicio Nacional de Contratación Pública (Sercop), the country’s public procurement agency, signed 114 medication supply agreements between May and June 2026. As of August 14, 2026, 71 of those agreements had not generated a single purchase order. Only six public institutions had placed orders, covering 43 of the 114 agreements.

The figure, reported by Primicias, means that more than six in ten framework contracts signed during the government’s proclaimed procurement push remain operationally inert. Suppliers hold signed agreements but receive no orders and no revenue. Public hospital pharmacies, meanwhile, remain short of the medicines those agreements were meant to deliver.

The four-month gap

The timing is notable. President Daniel Noboa announced the procurement drive on May 24, 2026, in his annual address to the Asamblea Nacional, framing it explicitly as a break from what he described as corrupt intermediary networks. ‘A las todas las mafias que esperaron la compra pública para ganar con sobreprecio, le adelanto: Esta es una compra internacional y transparente, de gobierno a gobierno,’ Noboa said, according to EFE. The agreements were signed within weeks. The purchase orders, nearly three months later, have not followed for the majority of them.

José Julio Neira, identified by the entity card as Sercop’s director and Secretary of Public Administration, has not issued a public explanation for the execution gap, according to available press materials. The agency has not publicly detailed which budget lines, audit requirements, or inter-institutional approvals are holding up the order issuance for the 71 dormant agreements.

A shortage with older roots

The procurement failure sits on top of a pre-existing fiscal crisis. The Asociación de Centros de Diálisis del Ecuador reported that the state’s cumulative debt to private dialysis clinics approached $200 million through April 2025, according to EFE. The Instituto Ecuatoriano de Seguridad Social (IESS), Ecuador’s social security institute, acknowledged to EFE that it had paid $113 million to dialysis providers in 2024 and $65.5 million in the first months of 2025, while admitting that audits for 2024 obligations remained incomplete, with a payment schedule that ‘depends on present and future economic resources.’

That debt context matters for interpreting the current order gap. Suppliers entering framework agreements with Sercop are doing so against a backdrop of documented state non-payment. The absence of purchase orders may reflect not only bureaucratic delay but also supplier caution about committing inventory to a counterparty with a known arrears record — though the available record does not confirm this dynamic explicitly.

The supply disruption has a parallel structural cause. According to Asedim, the Asociación Ecuatoriana de Distribuidores e Importadores de Productos Médicos (Ecuador’s association of medical product distributors and importers), Ecuador imports 99% of its medical supplies. Colombia supplies 15% of that total — equivalent to 42 million units and more than $51 million in 2025, per Asedim’s figures. A 50% tariff applied to Colombian goods in early 2026 added an estimated $21 million in additional costs to that supply line, according to Asedim. For dialysis specifically, Asedim reported that approximately 60% of the materials used in those treatments — filters, solutions, catheters — originate in Colombia. More than 20,800 people in Ecuador require between three and four dialysis sessions per week to survive, across 136 facilities, of which 105 are private and 31 are public, per Asedim.

The government-to-government procurement strategy was presented partly as a response to this supply vulnerability. On July 27, 2026, Noboa confirmed to radio Sucre, according to EFE, that Ecuador was in active dialogue with Colombia, Argentina, and Costa Rica — in addition to the India agreement — to source medicines. He described these as countries with ‘a fairly advanced pharmaceutical industry.’ For India specifically, Noboa stated that a roadmap had been established and that medicines would carry United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification. The Agencia Nacional de Regulación, Control y Vigilancia Sanitaria (Arcsa), Ecuador’s national health regulator, is conducting the homologation process for Indian-sourced products, per EFE.

The Confederación Nacional de Salud, Ecuador’s national health confederation, responded to the India announcement by requesting that any procured medicines carry internationally recognized quality certifications and that the identities of supplying laboratories and their manufacturing certifications be disclosed publicly before distribution, according to Infobae. The confederation’s position — that origin alone is insufficient as a quality criterion — introduces a regulatory prerequisite that could extend the timeline between a government-to-government agreement and actual product availability in hospitals.

That friction is the strongest counterargument to the procurement optimism embedded in the Noboa announcements. The Comisión Nacional Anticorrupción (CNA), Ecuador’s national anti-corruption commission, identified at least 100 suppliers that failed to meet regulatory standards in prior state procurement rounds, according to EFE, and flagged the case of Austral, a firm created two months before receiving a state contract and registered with a capital of $200. The CNA’s report, presented publicly in February 2026, described the resulting crisis as one of the worst periods of functional deterioration in Ecuador’s public health system. Accelerating procurement volume — signing 114 agreements in two months — does not by itself resolve the supplier-vetting and contract-execution weaknesses the CNA documented.

The deeper signal is that Ecuador’s medicine shortage has two distinct failure modes operating simultaneously: a diplomatic and contracting layer that is producing signed agreements at pace, and an execution layer — budget release, audit clearance, inter-agency order issuance — that is not. Closing the first gap without closing the second produces paperwork, not supply.